Thursday, October 15, 2015

Just a quick note to let you know that I have a new article at the International Business Times, which contains a bit more analysis of today's YouGov poll, and also discusses the increasing clarity from the SNP on the "material change of circumstances" that is necessary for a second independence referendum. You can read it HERE.

35 comments:

Well written mate. It is a difficult one because I have to chill my urge for another Indy ref but I have to hand it to our Nicola she is on top form and so are her team. Labour are spent, Lib Dems are a busted flush and the Conservatives will always be hated. The performance of our 56 and a stable government at Holyrood is growing the SNP support, hopefully that can turn people to indepence. I still have issues with the SNP but its unrealistic to be happy with every policy but on the whole I am more than satisfied.

Poor Anon reduced to correcting spelling mistakes and avoiding the ceriel. Do try and contribute to the welfare of the Scottish wirkin class and food banks. Engage yir brain and let go of yer nether region.

SNP has always looked after home business,just some folk wont look to see what has been done and no use me pointing it out its better to seek and find for yourself,then you can believe,but wait a minute what about 50 odd years of total Labour control? who's pockets got lined? its not what has been done or what hasn't but its realising that since the first Labour politician to take up the ermine that is when they abandoned the working class and preyed on the/us while being economical with the truth.

"You" do put the hours in but so, suddenly and out of the recent blue, do a lot of others on various other non-Unionist sites espousing the same permutations of the Union cult line.

Spooky:)

GCHQ established an office basement cave for you all at the Scotland Office, and a branch outpost at BritLab (Jockistan) in order to assist Herod of the Tories as well as your very own Pontius Pilate in his Butcher's Apron ensemble?

Or, perhaps, your'e a Pharisee LDPer going under a John Le Carre style legend as it's known in Black Ops?

Whatever. One common thread of yours and your fellow travellers' efforts seems to be the paucity of your collective, knee-jerk arguments, your liguistic posting styles, and the poverty of your covers as evidenced by your sites.

As you might have it said in your assumed vernacular: "Away and raffle yir bunnet, ya numptie!"

David. This is the only non onion site I have commented on. And I am not a fellow traveller. I make up my own mind and silly jokes. Can you say the same?The dead that fought real fascism have no voice and your butchers apron crap is laughable. You are a bit too thick to understand.

Nicola Sturgeon played an absolute blinder yesterday. No commitments to the next referendum, but no rule-outs either. Keep the barstewards guessing and guess what? Independence stays top of the agenda, courtesy of a panicking corporate media who feel they must face the threat head on each and every single day. Meanwhile, the Scottish Government gets on with the job it was elected to do.

Yep, all the pieces are coming together nicely for 2016 (and 2017). Labour is down but not out, and Scottish Labour remains the biggest obstacle to independence. They have to be taken out of the game completely. When, and only when, Labour are left in control of absolutely nothing in Scotland, then we can start the big push for IndyRef 2 and a favourable outcome.

It's a simple point about the basics of what polling can and can't tell you. I'm not going off on a tangent about whether Jeremy Corbyn is the messiah or not. I'd make precisely the same point about any other leader who was this early into their job.

I'm increasingly concerned about the use of iref weighting in online polls. It's starting to look like 2010 weighting, i.e. the numbers don't add up.

The common pattern is that the more SNP voters in the unweighted base, the lower the Yes. It should surely be the other way around.

Then I noticed that this yougov has a very high rUK born level in the unwieghted base - more so than usual at nearly double what it should be - yet the unweighted base is 46% Yes. It should be much lower Yes given rUK born were quite heavily against indy while Scottish born voted Yes narrowly.

I think people, like in 2010, are saying what they wished they had voted rather than what they voted. In 2010 it was tactical desperation to stop the Tories. In the iref maybe a panicked No...

SS- The RUK voters in the referendum were 78% against independence from memory. So you are correct.

I reckon if we can get that down to 69% or below we will win the next referendum. Hard to shift these peoples mindsets. Mostly it's media driven hysteria. We need to get them to move over to social media. The BBC is a busted flush and no good to our future.

The average Yes in Yougov unweighted bases this year is 45%. That sounds good until you note that the average rUK born in unweighted bases is 19% when it should be 10%. We know from Yougov's own tables that rUK born are much more against indy. So how come Yes is so high then?

Suggests some people are saying they voted Yes when they voted No and that's causing Yes to be down-weighted.

Would explain some of the discrepancy between online iref weighted polls and MORI/TNS non-iref weighted.

You can get them from YouGov's website. I wouldn't bother, though, because this is pretty tenuous stuff at best. SS seems to be pointing at there being too many rUK born people in the unweighted samples and wondering why that hasn't reduced the unweighted Yes vote. Well, there are countless possible reasons for that:

1. There are several other variables that he isn't mentioning (gender, age, etc.) that we know have an impact on people's tendency to have voted Yes. If those are unbalanced then that affects the result. In fact there are countless other aspects YouGov don't even use in their weighting and they could also have an impact. We have no idea how balanced or unbalanced those numbers are.

2. When you have small sample sizes this kind of variation always happens. This is why weighting isn't an exact science. Imagine there were 400,000 rUK born people to choose from (which is close to the actual number) and 25% were Yes voters. If you select 200 of them it's entirely possible (in fact highly likely) it isn't going to turn out you get exactly 50 Yes voters and 150 No voters.

3. The rUK born category itself is open to flaws at the best of times. There are quite a lot of Scots, raised in Scotland to Scottish parents, who were born in another part of the UK. I personally was born in England because my parents happened to live there and I moved back when I was 6 months old. It has zero impact on my political beliefs whatsoever yet if I were one of those people in this sample it could skew the results.

I've been on this site a few times and I've noticed SS pushing similar theories on numerous other occasions. It all seems to be flirting with quasi-conspiracy theory stuff about polling companies all being closet unionists (James himself had a notoriously silly exchange with a member of YouGov during the referendum where he came across as a kind of Scottish Alex Jones - if you can find it then it's hilarious). I've read at least 10 different variants of the same idea from SS and this one is probably one of the weaker efforts.

Not sure why. Nothing I said isn't true. It doesn't prove anything, but is rather odd and might offer an explanation as to why Yes is reduced when this method is applied.

I was so pleased to be proved completely correct when for a long time I complained that 2010 weighting was wrong*. Eventually the pollsters worked this out, with even the venerable Prof. C slamming it.

Likewise I felt vindicated when pollsters started weighting by country of birth. This too was something that I'd seen evidence was a problem where this had been asked of panels, yet was not being accounted for.

Damn those conspiracies theories which were not conspiracy theories; just one issues the pollsters needed to account for which they duly did (and not because of my comments on Scotgoespop!).

And the example you give of 'I'm Scottish but born in England' is totally irrelevant to the argument; Yougov show that those born in the rUK are consistently much more strongly No. That is all that matters.

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*People claimed to have voted SNP in much greater numbers in 2010 than was the case, even though when asked about 2011 in the same poll, they gave the right vote shares. Even telling them 'the election in which David Cameron became PM' in the 2010 question still had people saying 'I voted SNP' when they didn't.

I don't know which "Alex Jones" we're talking about in this instance - is it The One Show presenter? If so, I'm not sure she's particularly renowned for accusing pollsters of being "closet unionists".

That wasn't actually the point I was making to Janta-Lipinski anyway. He was in a foul mood that night, and was seeking out someone to make an example of with his defence of YouGov's wounded pride. He was annoyed that I pointed out in a blogpost that they are less transparent than other BPC pollsters, and then proceeded to helpfully prove my point by refusing to publish the missing figures! If there was a "notoriously silly" part of the exchange, as you put it, I'd suggest that was it.

Why are you posting anonymously, by the way? There have been a number of narky anonymous comments over the last day or two - would it be reasonable to assume you're responsible for all or most of them?